I've never been too intimidated by driving Subversion from the command line, so I've always maintained my branches by hand, keeping note of what had been merged in the check-in messages. But today Graham Tackley recommended I take a look at svnmerge. I must say, I didn't know what I was missing.
It keeps track of merges for you, ensuring that you'll never try to merge the same revision more than once, or miss any out by accident. Makes it easy to block revisions that you don't want to merge, too. Give it a try.
Don't forget - you'll need a decent merge tool, too
Posted to Software by Simon Brunning at November 01, 2007 12:39 PMThanks for the tips, I will give it a try. Looks like a really cool tool, especially the features for handling releases.
Posted by: Benjamin Sergeant on November 1, 2007 05:51 PMsvnmerge does rock, and it is a **HUGE** improvement over manual merge management. the only thing that would be better would be if subversion actually understood change-sets and could remember what individual changes applied to what file/directory.
then not only would 'blame' work correctly (currently merging in a changeset wipes all history of who made what change, unless you care to dig thru log messages), but you could merge changesets back and forth without caring so much about revision numbers as we do now, and be more concerned about applying particular changesets.
I haven't looked at distributed VCS's, but i think this is the sort of thing that eg-mercurial would handle really well.
Posted by: matthew kerle on April 29, 2008 01:42 AM